Author's note:I had time to think if I really wanted to jump on this particular band wagon of the fiction world- trying to console myself after he last episode. I found out that I coulnd't quite help myself. I mean, it's impossible isn't it, they way they keep abusing our trust...

Besides, I missed fiction world- even during the holidays.

Anyway, thank you to MickeyBoggs who reviewed this chapter even after a hard day of gardening.

Jane

Temperance leaned against the sink, the nausea barely held in check. She looked at the mirror, studying the nearly unknown reflection, the result of 4 days of anguish, of near prayer, of fierce control over her worst fear. She studied that reflection looking for signs of Temperance Brennan. She'd be damned if she could find any. Temperance Brennan was Booth's partner, his best friend, his confidant, his drinking mate, his middle of the night solace, his broad day light support. If he did not remember her, who was Temperance? She stared at the reflection until her face was nothing but lines, neither good nor bad, just lines all the more distorted the more she tried to make sense of them.

She heard the man move on his mattress, his "who are you" still burning a black hole in her heart where all the light was being sucked into. The distorted lines melted into a face again at her effort of concentration and, with a deep breath, she walked back into the room.

"Are you OK?" She could hear the concern in his smooth voice and read the worry in his oh-so-familiar face. But it was the worry for a stranger she heard and read, not what he usually saved for her, that worry that he loaded with the intimacy of a lover, a father, a brother. This was different. And it was like looking at an empty shell of him. And it broke her heart all over again. She wondered briefly how many times a heart could be mangled before it imploded. She hugged herself around her midsection, trying to hold herself up. She did not have the luxury of falling apart.

"Yes, thank you..."

Booth held his hand to her. His lips were dry and she could see he was already exhausted. She walked towards him and sat carefully by the bed to offer him the cup with ice chips she had kept fresh at his bedside table for when he woke up. His hand fell limp into hers, covered in bandages that kept a riddle of needles and tubes in place. He squeezed her fingers lightly. "I'm sorry"

Brennan took an ice chip from the cup and rubbed it over his dry lips, letting the ice melt into his parched mouth.

"I know." She rubbed an imaginary strand of hair out of his forehead.

"But it's going to be OK." And with that, the man who did not remember her gave her back a bit of herself: she was Temperance Brennan, the person Booth knew, better than anyone, how to console. He squeezed her hand again and drifted into sleep- or was it unconsciousness- once again.

******

"You should go home and get some sleep" His thumb rubbed lightly over the back of her hand. He knew that she had spent the last few hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair holding his hand. Throughout his sleep he had felt her soothing presence there. And he wished he could remember why she wanted to stay close to him.

She swallowed audibly. "You're right... I shouldn't be bothering you." He wished he understood why was it that her pain reverberated through his heart and why he felt lonely already at the thought of her leaving. His thumb continued rubbing circles over the back of her hand, unable to let go. He wished he understood that feeling that she was as vital to him as the air that he breathed.

"Isn't it time for pudding yet? We could share..." He wished he could understand why it felt so important to make her smile.

She consulted her wristwatch. "Just about."

His thumb traced the back of her fingers. She felt undernourished. He wondered if she ate properly. "Stay... Please"

He felt like a wuss. But it felt good to have her there. Even if he couldn't quite understand why.

****

The orderly was a motherly figure. She wheeled in a tray of odorless food she placed in front of Booth. She took a long look at Temperance and chided herself for not having thought about it before. It was more than obvious that the young woman had not been eating. She hadn't left the room since the man had been brought in. She walked back into the room and placed a second tray in front of the woman with the infinite, sad blue eyes.

"Here you go, dearie, you eat. Put some meat on those bones."

It was like a bell in Booth's mind, signaling that there was something in that sentence that was important. Something that he should know. But that something skirted just out of his grasp, an annoying feeling that he couldn't swat away or grasp. Temperance observed the feeling play across his face. Hope bloomed in her heart. Could it be that he only needed a key word to remember? But by the time he got to his pudding, the look was gone, as if he had forgotten that something was bothering him.

"I should go... let you get some rest." His hand immediately found hers and his thumb went back to rubbing the back of her hand.

"Will you come back?"

"I'll be here when you wake up" He knew she would. She turned off the lights and walked out. In the dim lights of the monitors he was attached to, he could see that she hadn't taken her coat or her purse. But before he could understand what that meant, his eyes closed and his brain gave up on understanding why.

*********

Temperance closed the door behind her and sat in the seat in the corridor outside the room. She waited five minutes, her hands patiently propped on her knees, her expression blank. Then, she removed her shoes and walked back in. His syncopated breathing told her he was asleep. She arranged the blanket to cover him- though there really wasn't any need- checked that the IV lines were running and took a seat close to the door of the room so that the typing wouldn't disturb his sleep. She switched on her laptop and opened a blank document as she had every night since he hand been wheeled out of the operating room, unconscious.

The wait was the worst part. Waiting for the morning. Waiting for news. Waiting for him. Waiting for her heart to beat again inside her chest. The cursor had blinked furiously, menacing, that first night. And then her fingers had detached from her brain and attuned to the frequency of her heart. That first night, Temperance experienced first hand the effect her writing had on her readers. She tuned out the smell of disinfectant in the air, the soft beeping of the monitors, the nurses coming in at regular intervals and the pain in her heart, the cold in her hands and surrendered to the appeal of literature- she entered a world of make believe- willingly, consciously. She very much deliberately put her brain in neutral and engaged her heart in overdrive- and her writing flowed fast and free from her thinning fingers. She broke the first rule of her writing- never be a character- and soothed her soul with fiction. She knew she was deliberately entering a world where reality did not matter. It only mattered that she could believe that life had not, once again, dealt her a wild card she did not know how to play. It was suspension of disbelief.

"I've missed you" a tall man whispers in his wife's ear. His eyes scan her tired face as he pulls her into the warm, comforting circle of his arms.

(To be continued)